Slightly TMI
by Fourth Rose
Summary: Life is full of surprises, and it's not always easy to tell whether they're good or bad. Written for the bitesize bones comm at LJ for the prompt: Brennan suffers a miscarriage and Booth is there to help her through the aftermath.


Ever since his Army days, Booth has been a light sleeper. That's why he always wakes up when Bones crawls out of bed in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, no matter how quiet she's trying to be. It doesn't bother him; he just goes back to sleep once she returns.

When she still isn't back after half an hour one night, he gets up to check whether she's all right.

He finds her perched on the rim of the bathtub, her shoulders hunched and her bathrobe pulled tightly around her as if she were cold. Her fingers are worrying a piece of plastic that looks like the wrapping of a sanitary pad.

She raises her head when he enters, and he's slightly alarmed by her expression. "Bones, is something wrong? Are you sick?"

She shakes her head. "I'm fine. It's just – I just got my period."

That really doesn't explain why she looks like a lost little girl alone in the woods; after all, this is the woman who claims that PMS is a social construct meant to convince women of their biological inferiority, or something like that. "You got – er, cramps or something?" Jeez, they've been together for six months now, but he still isn't comfortable with these kinds of discussions. Usually she would tease him about it, but she's clearly not in the mood.

"It's almost two weeks late."

Perhaps it's the fact that it's two in the morning, but it takes him a moment until he gets the full implication. "Oh – oh my." He quickly crosses the room and crouches down next to her. "You thought you were pregnant?"

She's still twisting the mangled piece of wrapping between her fingers. "Not at first, but – I did a test yesterday."

Booth feels his mouth go dry. "And?"

"It was positive." She doesn't quite meet his eyes. "I was planning a proper test at the lab tomorrow – home pregnancy tests are unreliable, and I wanted to be certain before I told you." She takes a deep breath, steadying herself. "It doesn't really matter now anyway."

He finally takes that damned wrapper away from her and covers her hands with his. "Bones, are you okay?" He's not altogether sure whether he's okay himself – this is a bit much to throw at a guy at two in the morning, but it isn't about him right now.

She frowns. "Yes, of course I am. It's not as if I was even thinking of – I mean, I suppose I should have foreseen the possibility, considering your exceptional test results two years ago, but since we…"

He takes pity on her and cuts off her ramblings. "You wanted a baby back then."

At last, she's really looking at him. "Things were very different then, Booth. I haven't thought of it since, and you never brought it up either, so it didn't seem important until last week. It's just – I think I had just begun to look forward to it, a little."

Booth suddenly finds it difficult to breathe. He wonders whether he's overreacting, but how is a guy supposed to react when the woman he's crazy about tells him she was looking forward to having his child?

She's composing herself now; the lost expression is gone, replaced by her usual, matter-of-fact demeanor. "It's probably better this way. I mean, shouldn't we first decide together whether we even want to have children?"

He can't help remembering how she asked him to be the father of her child two years ago, and for a moment he marvels at how far they've come since then. "Kids don't always wait for an engraved invitation, Bones; my son is living proof of that."

"I know that, of course, but I still think that the responsible thing to do is to first discuss the…"

He cuts her off again, this time by pressing a quick kiss on her lips. He's feeling strangely giddy, even though it seems rather inappropriate for the situation. "Tell you what, Bones, you come back to bed now and get some sleep, and tomorrow we're going to talk about it, okay?"

"Okay." There's a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, and breathing becomes difficult again for a second because seriously, there's only so much happiness he can take on an empty stomach in the middle of the night before he does something stupid.

Booth gets up, wincing slightly at the protest from his abused knees, and pulls her to her feet. She doesn't let go of his hand when she follows him back to the bedroom.


End file.
